New Sponsor: O’Reilly

I have also been in contact today w/ Oreilly, and it looks like we are awaiting approval.  This is a copy of the response I got back from them after I registered:

Thanks for registering for the O’Reilly User Group and Professional Association Program. Your application has been submitted for approval.

Explanation of program benefits:

Review copies:
O’Reilly offers free review copies of our books to qualified groups.  As the group contact, you may request a free review copy for your newsletter or web site. Requests for review copies MUST be submitted by you, as the contact of your group. If you wish for the review copy to be shipped to someone other than yourself, please supply the name, address and phone number of that person for shipment. Once a review of a book has been written, please send me a copy.

Discounts:
Your group members are entitled to a discount on O’Reilly products purchased directly from us. Information for placing an order is provided on the discount flyers that will be shipped to you, upon acceptance to the program. Your members are also entitled to a discount on O’Reilly conferences and tutorials. Other special discount offers may also be forwarded to your group from time to time.

Other benefits:
In addition, we regularly donate books and other promotional items for raffles or auctions to help your group raise money, or for meeting door prizes. On a quarterly basis, we’ll send our latest catalog. Some of our authors are willing to speak at user group meetings–let us know if you are interested and well do what we can to help you arrange speakers.

We’ll also send you links to articles, tips, and news from the O’Reilly web site: www.oreilly.com and from the O’Reilly Network: www.oreillynet.com when we think the topics may interest you.

What you can do for O’Reilly:

*Post an O’Reilly banner to your web site, which you can find at: http://ug.oreilly.com/banners/
*Encourage your members to review our books and post the reviews on Amazon, your site, newsletter
*If you don’t have a web site, but you do have a newsletter, please print our sponsorship information

I look forward to working with you,

Marsee Henon
O’Reilly

New Sponsor: CodeSmith Tools

I communicated back and forth today w/ CodeSmith Tools from Dallas and they have agreed to sponsor our group! They are going to donate one license each month to our group so that we can have a drawing.  Here’s a copy of their email response:

We can donate 1 a month until your group grows.  That way one person doesnt keep winning and winning.
Below is our logo if you want to put it on your site.  I will need for you to collect the winner’s full name and email after your meeting. I will send that license directly to them.  I cannot pre-generate licenses.

If you would be kind enough to keep this email thread so i remember and also let me know if your group numners increase dramatically, that would be really helpful.

Good luck with your Refresh Group!
Thanks for using CodeSmith Tools!
CodeSmith Marketing
marketing@codesmithtools.com

New Website Launched!

My partners registered this domain name for us and I have installed Wordpress on it.  If you are a member of the group and would like to be setup as an admin or editor, just drop me a note: cotton.rohrscheib@pleth.com and I will get you added.  Here are few needs I see that we are going to be needing:

  • Volunteers to write the content (about us page, sponsors page, contact us page, etc.)
  • Volunteers to help come up w/ our logo (we can probably get some submissions together and vote on them at our next meeting)
  • Volunteers interested in hacking out the design / layout of the theme.  This is a basic theme that I threw on to get us up and running.
  • If you have a blog or company website you want listed in the blogroll shoot me a note, I quickly ran through our Facebook Group and pulled out these links, some of them might be wrong.
  • Sponsorships.  I have spoken w/ a few software vendors today and should touch base w/ a few more next week.  If you have some that you work with closely, please ask them to sponsor us.